The annual Commencement Ceremony for City College of San Francisco takes place at the end of every spring semester in May. The ceremony is for all CCSF A.A. & A.S. Degree candidates who meet the graduation requirements at the main campus and all the centers. The ceremony usually hosts between 400-500 graduates that cross the stage in their cap & gown while approx. 3000 guests cheer them on!

Commencement is a wonderful experience and we encourage all graduating students to register and participate in this annual ceremony. All participating graduates, and students graduating with honors, will be listed in the Commencement Program as well as the Student Speaker. The ceremony will honor and recognize students for their hard earned academic achievment and welcome them into the ranks of C.C.S.F. alumni. We promote a strong etiquette policy, and strive to bring all students a ceremony that is worthy of their success.

The achievement of higher education should never go unrecognized or unrewarded. So know that the Office of Student Affairs welcomes you to participate in your Commencement Ceremony and is here to help ensure your commencement day is a valued and cherished experience!

Join us for a Fundraising Dinner Thursday April 25th,6-8 pm at the Pierre Coste Dining Room $100 per person, RSVP to Diana Markham,(415) 239-3467, dmarkham@ccsf.edu.

Come by the CCSF Physics Department office, SCIE 185 on theOcean Campus to pick up an event map. For more information contact the PhysicsDepartment Chair, Diana Markham, (415) 239-3467.

Leading Educator in Physics

Paul Doherty is a Senior Staff Scientist and Director of theTeacher Institute at the Exploratorium where his main job is helping highschool science teachers make science relevant, interesting, correct and fun.The Exploratorium is an amazing place to learn physics. Paul built severalexhibits at the museum and has many stories of exhibit creation, operation anddestruction to share. At the Exploratorium Paul was a creator of the webcastseries “Iron Science Teacher” in which teachers are given a secret ingredientand challenged to create science lessons using it. Ingredients range from lightemitting diodes to fruitcakes and the lessons are often humorous. He hasauthored many books including the million selling Explorabook and Book ofMagnetic Magic by Klutz Press and the books Color of Nature and Traces of Timeby Chronicle Books. He also writes the science fact column for the Magazine ofFantasy and Science Fiction - which was Isaac Asimov’s old job. He publishes anaward winning website with hundreds of pages of science explorations.(http://www.exo.net/~pauld)

Paul is an expert on atmospheric optics and the discovererof the shape of the Martian carbon dioxide snowflake, they are cuboctahedrons.He also was the first to calculate and display the appearance of stars whenviewed from a relativistic spacecraft. This discovery led to his mention in thescience fiction book Starburst by Frederick Pohl.

Paul won the competition as best science museum demonstratorat the World Congress of Museums in Helsinkiby playing music on a “whirly”, a corrugated plastic hose. As he played, hedescribed the physics that made the hose sing. He has received the FaradayAward for Excellence in Science Teaching from the National Science TeachersAssociation. He accepted the invitation by the Dalai Lama to journeyed to Indiato teach science to Tibetan Monks. (The monks chose Paul Hewitt’s ConceptualPhysics book as their textbook.)

Paul is a rock climber who has led thousands of rock climbsand led the first ascent of Sierra Nevada de Lagunas Bravas, a 20,000 footmountain in the Andes.He has also climbed Mount Erebus in Antarctica to look into its boiling lava lake.

In the 1990s Paul Doherty was a physics professor at CityCollege of San Francisco and filled in when Paul Hewitt went on leave, teachingthe course “Physics at the Exploratorium” several times. That course followedFrank Oppenheimer’s philosophy that the best way to learn science was todirectly experience the phenomena of science. That is Paul’s philosophy as welland so he will have the audience do science activities during his presentation.